Six Months Later...

And so it continues...
It's been quite a while since I last had a blog post, despite the occasional words of encouragement from Claire. Things in graduate school are pretty much always busy. It's hard to justify wasting time writing a blog. It's far easier to waste time on Reddit or elsewhere in the cesspool of the internet where no remnant of the lost moment will remain.
Alas, things are pretty good here. I have a deeper understanding of my expectations now and have learned to grow as a scientist and be sane simultaneously. Our year lost a couple more students, I can't help but wonder if they're better off. It seems like every week I read another article about how the university system is the next unsustaniable bubble that's going to burst, or how the Ph.D. is useless these days. There's lots of Ph.D.s and simply not enough jobs I fear. Academics don't retire and open up the gates for new academics. I guess that's an artifact of not actually enjoying your life until you're 40 when things settle down and you're actually running a lab. I've said time and again that I wouldn't be doing this if I felt like there was something else better to do. I guess I have this pipe dream of being a bona fide scientist with his own lab doing what he wants and letting his interests guide his work. It seems like quite the journey from here.

So what have I been doing in the last six months? The short story is, well, a lot. I rotated through Josep Comeron's lab early this year and sequenced 24 complete genomes to address the question of how recombination varies within a species at different conditions. It was a really great rotation project, and added to the labs over 4000 genomes they've compiled in the last year. It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed the people, pace, questions, and approach.
The rotation ended and then I got to go to Sarit Smolikove's lab. Sarit is perhaps the best adviser that one could wish for. She's dedicated, interested, and very involved. I have to reject the null hypothesis that Ph.D.s don't actually do benchwork when I'm around her (P<.01). She teaches and spends at least 10 hours a day actively doing research, and that gives me a lot of hope for my future career. My project in her lab was to determine what proteins interacted with one that they had implicated in synaptonemal complex dissassembly (the protein scaffolding that holds together homologous chromosomes during meiosis)--the first protein discovered to be involved in this process. I produced a lot of hits, and knocked a few of them out in vivo to see how they affected meiosis. A really cool project. I feel like I'd be in her lab right now if she had a grant. It's sad, but she already has two graduate students and no grants to keep them going. I think she'll eventually pick up a solid grant, but I just can't risk having to teach every semester and watch my productivity take a nose dive.
So, that left me to join Josep's lab. I started last week and will be there for the next four to five years working on recombination variation. Our first task is to get a review paper out the door. As such, I've been reading articles pretty much every day. Basically this way I can get my first paper in the lab, the first quarter of my comprehensive exam written, part of a grant application, and a piece of my thesis written within the first semester of my work in the lab. I think Josep is really thinking ahead on this one, which is a very good thing if I'm to get out of here in a reasonable amount of time.
I suppose the next obstacle in my way is our Qualifying Exam. We've been given the topics for the exam and are expected to know them well enough to answer specific questions within the topics on July 10th. I've started the studying process and should be ready by that time. Some topics are specific and doable, like "The biology of small interfering RNAs", while others are extremely broad, "The origins and maintenance of diversity in natural populations." Oh well, just another hoop to jump through.

I suppose that's all I've got. Haley will be passing through Iowa City in early June and staying the night at my place with Ari--I still haven't told her that I don't actually have a couch for her to sleep on, but I'll drag out the small mattress for her. It should be a fun time.

Cheers,
Andrew

Thinking about changing the world...

Well, howdy all. Above this is one of the first pictures of epithelial nuclei that I obtained about a month ago. As you can see, it is much better than the confocal images I took prior to that. Some times low(er) tech is the way to go.
As of now, I'm sitting in the library trying to think of a good way to change the world with my Ph.D. dissertation. It's an NSF exercise, basically,...that if I got lucky enough would fund me at $30,000 + tuition and $8000 for research for the next three years. The money isn't the big goal though, receiving one of these NSF GRFP fellowships basically means that you can do postdoctoral work wherever you want and, more, ensures that you're likely to get more NSF money in the future. The National Science Foundation really likes keeping their money for people they like, so they support people throughout their scientific career. This would be nice, while they don't dish out quite as much dough as the National Institutes of Health, they do provide researchers with hefty grants nonetheless. Money like this is essential to doing really big projects and getting tenure at a major research university.
So that leads me to my project proposal....
I have no idea what I'm going to suggest. The problem is, they want to see transformative ideas that will go a ways toward revolutionizing a field. NSF loves this kind of stuff, and wants to see this along with what they call "Broader Impacts". Essentially, this means that my work has to be distributed to the public in some form of outreach. They want to see that I'm going to go out and disseminate all of the knowledge I gain through their money.
Unfortunately, most of the people that I'm competing with have spent the last five years in Kenya teaching science to crippled children while rebuilding medical facilities and searching for an AIDS cure.  Competition is steep...and if you don't have a transformative idea, you're dead in the water. Since I didn't quite get to the grad schools I pitched my transformative ideas to, I need to start again. And in a hurry.

At present, I'm twiddling with a few things that could be done. Most of them, however, hinge on having more genomic data about our snails in the Neiman lab. I've got to say...that just sucks. I'd also like to test our assumptions about Polyploidy or Asexuality, but there are way too many variables in this system to pin down just one! At this moment, I'm thinking about looking at how snails become triploid or tetraploid. I've got an interesting idea to look at the process...I just need to spend a few more hours on PubMed to see if it's even feasible. But then, I've got to relate it to the bigger picture and suggest how it will change the world. I think it might, I just have to solidify the connection!

Maurine returns from her European journeys this week. I've not gotten as much lab work done while she has been gone as I expected to. That's okay, though, since I really feel like I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning lately. Alas, back to work!